The story of the North Carolina 4-H Museum & History Center really begins more than seventy years ago in Cumberland County.  It was there, in the depths of the Great Depression, that a young boy planted a plot of peanuts as part of a 4-H project and roasted them in his mother’s kitchen.  Amidst the pleasing aroma of roasting peanuts, Rudolph Carl Ellis detected a scent of potential profit as well.  At that instant, Ellis’ Fancy Peanuts was born.  Peddling – and literally pedaling on his bicycle – the bags of peanuts throughout a territory ranging from Dunn to Elizabethtown, Ellis amassed enough money to put his family into a new house on land of their own at the eve of the Second World War.  The “House That 4-H Peanuts Built” was gifted to
4-H by the Ellis Family and is today the centerpiece of the new, North Carolina 4-H Museum & History Center at Millstone 4-H Camp in Ellerbe, North Carolina. 

The house is the centerpiece and the beginning of a broader vision for the North Carolina 4-H Museum & History Center.  That vision is what 4-H Honor Club member and Museum Committee volunteer Malcolm Hawkins calls a “conceptual clover.”  It is the first of the four “leaves” of which the complex is comprised.  A new History Center, a Heritage Courtyard, and the Farm Bureau Old-Fashioned Farm Shop are the other “leaves” in this grand clover at Millstone 4-H Camp.

Support for the Museum & History Center continues to grow:

Commitment of the North Carolina 4-H Museum Committee membership ~ $100,000

The North Carolina Peanut Growers Association $100,000

North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation $ 75,000

Pee Dee Electric Membership Cooperative $15,000